This is my second SCP and while unrelated to my first…I'm seeing a pattern that maybe I'm subconsciously obsessed with the Tower of Babel story……maybe I should look into that…..

This was inspired by my nihilistic fear of the heat death of the universe, by http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-8900-ex, and by the Robert Frost poem, Mending Wall (from which I got the main series title….if that is inappropriate re: copyright I'll change the title to either Heat Death of the Universe or Thermodynamic Equilibrium or Second Law of Thermodynamics).

I still worry about whether the idea will grab people (or even make sense to people not already physics dorks), but I love:
-Heat Death of the Universe/Entropy as an SCP.
-The idea that something we readers think of as normal is actually the SCP and "historical in-world normal" is something we readers can barely comprehend. See for example http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-8900-ex
-Operation Gaslight.

My head cannon is that there is some omnipotent that has been putting up with all this universe wide growth and building but really wants things to simmer down and they have had enough, the wall is too damn high let it fall.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, there is no such thing as Carnot Convection…..anymore…..

The Tower of Babel allegory is buried too deep to have a real significance. Because there are no real-world dates or names to provide context, I'm not feeling any sense of frisson from the idea that entropy was created by God to halt human progress.

Oh that is fair, and it wasn't intended as a tower of babel analogue, I just sort of realized that layer was present while writing it.

I wanted it to be left open whether it has anything to do with humans per se. With all the aliens etc out there, and heck just the galaxies themselves flying around, Humans might not even be the target of it.

EDIT: in response to this and other feedback, I unredacted a few things, including what was being developed at the time that may have instigated things.

The idea is so audacious, and a detail or two (such as "The Last Question" being a Foundation plant) wild enough to strain my suspension of disbelief, but it's so well executed I can't help but like this.

I also respect the idea and execution of what's present, but I don't think it goes far enough. This is a big idea - enough to be an 001 proposal (take that as a compliment) - but it's expressed as a mid-length article, and doesn't delve into any deeper philosophising about the ramifications of this thing. You could argue that this approach would be appropriate to the Foundationverse and it purely boils down to personal taste, which is fair, but I also don't think this is in character for the Foundation. If you compare it to SCP-8900-EX, while it doesn't go into much detail, it's made clear that accepting the colours of everything changing was a hard decision and large amounts of time and resources were dedicated to restoring normalcy. This, despite having infinitely more serious consequences, seems to have been met with a 'welp I guess this is just how things are now' (with nobody ever revisiting that assumption in 100 years).

Your reaction is totally legit and i take your 001 comment as a huge compliment.

I wanted to clarify that the Foundation isn't throwing up their hands. They made it a Chi priority (which I invented but means "maximum importance but minimal urgency." They even are using Operation Crowdsource (another thing I made up but it's so serious and they have had so little progress that they are getting outside sources to work on the problem unknowingly….my ead cannon is that this is almost never used).

I could have gone more into their "ongoing" research, but I wrote it with the idea that 100 years of active and motivated research has lead to absolutely zero leads. If it weren't killing the universe, maybe they would have some hard decisions like in 8900-EX to accept it, but as it stands they will never accept it…even if they can't change it.

Hey, author of the 001 French article here! It's okay, you didn't know about it when you wrote yours, and it's kind of an obvious idea in the first place, so I don't really mind. I only hope it won't end up being so popular people end up telling me I plagiarised you, haha.

Believe it or not, this idea (that entropy in the way we know it today was made by humans in a cosmic-level "oopsie") is a 001 proposal over in the French branch. Dr. Johannes' Proposal: The Xibalba Project. Almost the same coverup, too. For that same reason I'm an iffy novote because I'm glad the idea made it into the English site but since it's already been done it feels…reposti.

I’ve always been a fan of 8900-EX and the general concept of the Foundation going to extreme lengths to preserve normalcy, even to the point of redefining what is normal, and I think the “Enough.” bit was a great touch that gave this article the narrative backbone to stand apart from its predecessors.

as an astronomy and physics nerd, I loved this. I liked the addendum with each object(s) being affected by the entropy. The fact that things we know or have "explained" are actually SCPs adds nice realism and fear into it. Really cool ideas. Also, entropy is a cool word. +1 :).

So not really, and I struggled over the title. I was inspired by Robert Frost’s poem, Mending Fence which starts with “something there is that doesn’t love a wall”. I think that might have been commentary about how nature abhors separateness and division, but I took it as nature abhors building.

I wondered what a thing that hates walls would look like and decided it was “entropy itself given form”

I toyed with other names in the draft forum and chat, but didn’t get any good feedback. Other options were The Second Law of Thermodynamics, or Entropy, or Thermodynamic Equilibrium, or Heat Death or Heat Death Of The Universe

Thoughts? I didn’t intend to change the title after posting but if it is causing issues I will consider it.

I kind of had to double-check since I thought I had read it wrong the first couple of times. I would suggest try keeping the original title, but adding something to it to avoid people into thinking that they read it wrong.

As a physics major, the idea that entropy itself is effectively anomalous, and that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a gigantic Foundation cover-up for that, hit me like a ton of bricks. Confident +1 to you, my good man.

There is a nasty problem with this one, the previous state of the universe described is either one that prevents any work from happening, or it loops on a short time scale. Either way it's one that is utterly incompatible with life. The big bang, wouldn't among other issues.

I like the idea that entropy is anomalous, but it also means that effects of time as we know them used to not exist. Entropy can be seen as the way of distinguishing the direction of time, removing it removes everything that depends on time.

That is exactly what an intelectual who grew up under the effects of SCP-4039 and Operation Gaslight would think. If you are interested in learning more about how things worked before Event 4039-1, you can attend Dr. Remi's 73 part lecture provided at Site 19 entitled "Wait huh what do you mean there just 'didn't used to be entropy' that is nuts: Yeah we know but trust us, anomalous physics only get weirder from here."

Dr. Remi is a great historian and physicist. He is not very good at naming things.